Gear teeth are typically formed by hobbing or shaping which produces finite machining marks and slight deviations from the desired involute profile due to inherent manufacturing tolerances. If the gear tooth surfaces are not ground and finished to remove these imperfections, they will have a detrimental effect on the meshing action with mating gears, undesirable high noise levels, excessive stress, and early failure.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,961,289 issued on Oct. 9, 1990 to Gerd Sulzer discloses a two body worm to fine-finish the surfaces of gear teeth. The two body worm includes a rough grinding body coated with a carbide coating and a polishing body made of an elastic synthetic material. The two bodies are then mounted on a single arbor for use in a gear grinding machine. It is imperative that the helical surfaces or spiral path of the two bodies be continuous without interruption. Any deviation will result in the gear surfaces being out of tolerance. Undesirably, setting and maintaining the two worm bodies in proper alignment is very difficult and time consuming.
Thus, what is needed is an apparatus of unitary construction for grinding and finishing gear tooth surfaces that requires no critical alignment, is highly accurate, is of unitary construction in order to entirely eliminate misalignment during operation, and has short machining times with economical processing cost.
The present invention is directed to overcome one or more of the problems as set forth above.